Chapter 1. A Short View of Ignorance
Chapter 2. Finding Out
Chapter 3. Limits, Uncertainty, Impossibility, and Other Minor
Problems
Chapter 4. Unpredicting
Chapter 5. The Quality of Ignorance
Chapter 6. Ignorance in Action: Case Histories
Chapter 7. Ignorance beyond the Lab
Stuart Firestein is Professor and Chair of the Department of
Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his highly
popular course on ignorance invites working scientists to come talk
to students each week about what they don't know. Dedicated to
promoting science to a public audience, he serves as an advisor for
the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program for the Public
Understanding of Science and was awarded the 2011 Lenfest
Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for excellence in scholarship
and teaching. Also, he was recently named an AAAS Fellow.
"Firestein, a popular professor of neurobiology at
Columbia...describes clearly how scientists continually uncover new
facts that confront them with the extent of their ignorance, and
how they successfully grapple with uncertainty in their daily
research work. With ample examples from neuroscience he describes
the limits of what we currently know, what the uncertainties are,
and why they arise especially in the study of complex systems like
the brain, the
olfactory system, human vision, climate change, and earthquakes."
--The New York Review of Books
"[A] sparkling and innovative look at ignorance . . . We should
remember that when a sphere becomes bigger, the surface area grows.
Thus, as the sphere of scientific knowledge increases, so does the
surface area of the unknown. Firestein's book reminds us that it is
at this interface that we can claim true and objective
progress."
--MIchael Shermer for Nature
"Firestein challenges our culture's pat view of science as a simple
process of placing one brick of knowledge on top of another in a
simple progression toward greater knowledge."
--Publishers Weekly
"[I]t's the latter - the unanswered questions - that makes science,
and life, interesting. That's the eloquently argued case at the
heart of Ignorance: How It Drives Science, in which Stuart
Firestein sets out to debunk the popular idea that knowledge
follows ignorance, demonstrating instead that it's the other way
around and, in the process, laying out a powerful manifesto for
getting the public engaged with science - a public to whom, as
Neil
deGrasse Tyson recently reminded Senate, the government is
accountable in making the very decisions that shape the course of
science."
--BrainPickings.org
"Ignorance, it turns out, is really quite profound, and this is a
good introduction to the subject." --Library Journal
"Stuart Firestein's Ignorance offers a pithier and more nuanced
look at the fallibility of science." --Slate
Chosen by New Scientist's Culture Lab as one of the Ten Books to
look out for in 2012
"This is a fascinating little book . . . it's Ignorance: How It
Drives Science by Stuart Firestein, and it will blow your mind as
we used to say back in the '60s..."
--Ira Flatow, NPR's Science Friday
"An excellent read, Ignorance would be a fine companion text for
potential scientists at the beginning of their studies. The book
reminds us that although we are repeatedly given the impression our
world contains an endless amount of knowledge, most of that is
inaccessible to us, and it is the absence of knowledge that should
concern us. Firestein's short account may even make you embrace
your ignorance, wearing it like a badge of
honor." -- Science
"[A] short, highly entertaining book aimed at nonscientists and
students who want to be scientists. The book comes at an important
time. Today's most vociferous scientific controversies turn on
different interpretations of facts - about climate change, about
contraception, about evolution. When politics are injected, the
shouting grows louder, the thinking muddier. Uncertainty is a dirty
word. Dr. Firestein, by contrast, celebrates a tolerance for
uncertainty,
the pleasures of scientific mystery and the cultivation of doubt.
If more people embraced the seductive appeal of uncertainty, he
says, it might take some acrimony out of our public debates."
--Sandra
Blakeslee, New York Times
"[I]ntelligent and entertaining." --Wall Street Journal
"Firestein's ideas about how science works will strike most
scientists as obvious. But his examples are interesting enough to
keep those already committed to his thesis turning the pages, and
for the non-scientist he offers a valuable counterbalance to
know-it-all scientists and the portrayal of science by the media."
--Books & Culture
"This is a lovely little book, which is truly about what drives
science; and it's not about physics, or chemistry, or engineering,
but real biology." --The Biologist
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